Bombing Notes

SHELTER --Jane Nicholson -- Viking ($2.50).

This novel, by a woman who lives in London, is by far the most vivid and intimate set of laboratory notes, to date, on what it is like to live in a bombed city. Considered too strong reading for Britons, its English publication is being withheld. The manuscript reached the U.S. with three small deletions by the censor. Some bits of London life* as Miss Nicholson describes it:

London's raid routine (when the Germans are coming over as they did during the last half of 1940) is stiff as a timetable. The Alert is sounded about at the end of dinner, the All Clear at about dawn. There is another warning by 8 a.m., several more during the morning, one at noon as sure as etiquette (which cheats no Londoner out of his lunch). During the afternoon those who care to may usually witness a "dogfight"; then, from 4 p.m. until dark, it is ordinarily quiet. Each metropolitan dusk, in that suspended silence and foreboding, is deep with a quality of sadness new to history. And in this dusk the humble, scorning their useless surface shelters, form their huge processions toward the untoileted stench of the Tubes of the West End.

By daylight, in the Strand, "people drifted by with a half-dazed, half-sleepy expression on their faces, as if they had forgotten something but couldn't remember what it was. Something uneasy, abnormal in this leisure, like . . . like a watch running down."

By daylight too, when first the West End was bombed, the East End swarmed over round-eyed and unmalicious, "forgetting its own scenes of horror in the rapture of the new . . . and goes back, to sit down in the windowless, doorless shells of its homes and tells its less adventurous neighbors that they 'aven't arf made a mess of Bond Street."

Words like "next year," "next week," have faded from the language. "We have lost our sense of time. You no longer do things when you will, but when you can." The acoustics of London are changed; you hear odd noises, odd distances; can gauge the place a bomb has fallen with an almost instrumental delicateness. In the strange thinness of traffic it is possible for the first time to appreciate "the breadth and architecture of streets."

Eggs, cigarets, coffee, good soap, hot baths have become cherished frugalities; a full night's rest as distant as a dream. One yields, in the course of time, to a "sleep-drunkenness" which no bomb can budge.

The book is filled with small, swordlike glimpses of London and its creatures:

> The Admiralty Arch blocked with barbed wire.

> Piccadilly "calm, broad, empty, filled with its early morning shadow" in a watery flashing loudness of swept glass; shrapnel "rattling like hail through the broken trees of the square. . . ."

> The whores who cruise out of Sackville Street in their hired silver foxes and their spindle heels; "business as usual. . . ."

> Two refined ladies plankwalking across a 20-foot bomb crater; and a childishly calm, old and poor woman who, with a broken saucer, sands a newly fallen incendiary bomb. ...

> A horse which stands straight into the air, milk bottles spilling from his cart, as a delayed bomb goes off near by; and a leashed cairn which makes water on a red curtain blown into the middle of the street. . . .

>A shelter in which prim, kind, brave white-collar workers maintain their decencies throughout the brutal night: covering the noises of their crude latrine with artificial chatter, holding complete silence while a middle-aged woman, a schoolteacher, kneels at her folding cot and says her prayers. . . .

> "We are very moved," the author remarks, "and no less surprised, at tributes paid to our courage in the foreign press. . . . We are the more grateful for having our courage pointed out to us in that we ourselves have not noticed it."

To prove that a British literary magazine is worth the paper it is printed on, Manhattan's Gotham Book Mart is gathering testimonials in favor of London's Horizon (Editors Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender), which has tried to keep a quiet, distinguished cultural voice in history's most deafening time & place. Threatened by England's paper shortage, Horizon will not continue to get paper rations unless British and U.S. intellectuals speak up.

* Since the period covered is August-October 1940, some of the material is already less news than history.

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